Smoking articles, particularly cigarettes, are most commonly packed in hinge-lid packs, slide-and-shell packs, hard cup packs or soft cup packs. To preserve the freshness of said smoking articles, a common approach is sealing the packs, especially hinge-lid packs, with a barrier material such as polypropylene wrapper. Alternatively, the smoking articles may be sealed as a bundle inside a single sealable material without additional protective layers.
For example, EP-A-751,069 discloses a method to make such a sealed bundle. In a first step a sealable material is introduced into a U-shaped pocket of a packing device for smoking articles. In a second step the group of smoking articles is moved into the U-shaped pocket. In a third step the sealable material is closed around the group of smoking articles. In a final step the sealable material is sealed around the group of smoking articles, thus forming the sealed bundle.
The prior art method has the disadvantage, that the sealable material is sealed while the smoking articles are already contained in the sealable material. Thus the sealing of the sealable material is performed against the smoking articles and may potentially expose the smoking articles to an undesirable amount of local heat.
A further method avoiding this disadvantage is disclosed in EP-A-1,686,060. Also in this case, the smoking articles are introduced into a sealable material shaped into a U-form. The sealable material is then sealed aside of the group of smoking articles, instead of being backed by the smoking articles. The disadvantage of this method is that additional folding operations are required as well as additional sealable material.